Mitchell considers the situation to be among the craziest he's been part of since he began fixing costumes that go awry at comic conventions about six years ago. He also fixed the nuts and bolts on the armor of a 40K Warhammer Space Marine when the joint from his shoulder down to his arm broke.

Mitchell is a self-dubbed costume corpsman, an on-site Mr. Fix-It who comes to the rescue of the cosplayers whose outfits didn't work out as they'd intended. Sporting military fatigues, he carries hot glue, crazy glue, cement glue, sharpies, multiple colors of thread, safety pins, a Dremel tool, soldering iron, hot glue gun, Gold Bond medicated powder and a whole lot more in the front and back of his vest.

He can tell you all about which glue to use so that it won't peel later on when your body heat affects the costume.

"I fix holes in space and time, but not relationships. It's too complicated," he said.

Mitchell has been attending cons for about 20 years, and he saw that people were always looking for quick fixes to the costumes they'd spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on and plenty of blood, sweat and tears making.

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Vic Mitchell carries thread, Sharpies, tape and other materials to fix cosplayers' costumes on site. He was at GenCon on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2017.(Photo: Domenica Bongiovanni/IndyStar)

"Something always happens," he said. "They pop a stitch, they lose a button, and one of the biggest things that you always see is they're going around to each other going, 'Do you have a button, do you have another safety pin, anyone have any thread, anyone have any glue?'

"And so I said wouldn't it be nice if there was somebody that would have all that so they didn't have to worry about it."

So Mitchell became an emergency costume repairman after studying cosplay and creating his own toolkit. He works Gen Con and other cons when he has time.

Aside from his fatigues get-up, he doesn't wear a costume.

"Why dress up and be the center of attention when I can come and I can admire all this other stuff?" he said. "I mean there are people with much better imaginations (than) me."

Mitchell is semi-retired now, resides outside Orlando, Fla., and works in federal security, he said. He lived in Indianapolis for a while, and Gen Con gives him the opportunity to see his family.

Vic Mitchell carries a soldering iron and other tools to fix cosplayers' costumes on site. He was at GenCon on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2017.(Photo: Domenica Bongiovanni/IndyStar)

Cosplayers "put in hundreds and thousands of hours, some of them do, for something that they are completely and totally passionate about, and they try to think of everything," he said.

"Or I can have someone who has built their very first cosplay, they're wearing it for the first time, and it messes up. And it can be devastating because they blame themselves that they didn't think about it or they didn't know. And so what I do is I just help them."